Episode #278: 

Anthony Blatner, Managing Director, Founder, and CMO at Speedwork, explains how LinkedIn can transform ABM programs into a measurable pipeline. He outlines the importance of defining target audiences, aligning teams, and building dynamic account lists. He also discusses intent signals, persona targeting, and thought leader ads. These strategies help organizations reach buying groups and improve the quality of qualified leads.

“You’re going to build trust the fastest when you’re going person to person. You’re going to trust a person that you’re seeing talking about something on LinkedIn versus a brand that you’re not familiar with. You can go look at that person’s profile and get to know them. If you’re reaching out to a company, you’re not going to build that trust as fast.” – Anthony Blatner

This episode explores how B2B leaders can use LinkedIn to move beyond awareness and create a pipeline from target accounts. Anthony shares practical guidance on aligning sales and marketing, refining ICP definitions, and using dynamic targeting. He also explains how thought leadership ads and intent signals improve engagement and accelerate buying cycles.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a really eye-opening conversation that we’re going to have with Anthony Blatner. Now, Anthony, you are the founder of a LinkedIn ads agency, and there are a lot of ad agencies out there, right?

[00:00:23] Steve MacDonald: But you’re one of 10 people in North America that has been certified as a LinkedIn ads expert by LinkedIn, and it’s only 50 worldwide. And your agency is growing like crazy. I saw that on the stats on LinkedIn and everything. You also kind of wrote the book. There’s one of two sanctioned LinkedIn ad courses that you’ve written.

[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: So you kind of live and breathe LinkedIn, and that’s what’s important because to the C-suite executives that are tuning in, we’re all B2B, we’re all in an ABM go-to-market motion. We all know how important LinkedIn is, but we also know it’s really hard to get engagements. There’s a lot of crap on LinkedIn, and like, how do we use it?

[00:01:10] Steve MacDonald: Right. How do we monetize it, and how do we use it at every stage of the ABM process? Can we actually turn our targeted ABM accounts into a real pipeline, and can LinkedIn help us do that? These are questions that I know you dabble with all the time when you’re new to your business and your clients, and you talk about all the time.

[00:01:31] Steve MacDonald: So that’s what we want to accomplish today. We want to get a little masterclass in how to do this.

[00:01:37] Anthony Blatner: There’s a lot that we could talk about there for sure.

[00:01:39] Steve MacDonald: Well, good. What I would love to do is have you add a little bit to that before we dig right in.

[00:01:47] Steve MacDonald: And I thought it was fascinating. You know, you’re one of 10. You are also a big runner. You compete in marathons. There’s a very small percentage of us that actually get to that level and compete regularly in marathons. So congratulations on that. Keep moving as we get older and older, because it’s more important.

[00:02:04] Steve MacDonald: Right? So anyways, I’d love to hear a little bit more about your background, and then we’ll dig in.

[00:02:09] Anthony Blatner: Sure. These days, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, but I’ve been in the marketing world for a long time now. About seven or eight years ago, we decided to focus on LinkedIn marketing.

[00:02:20] Anthony Blatner: My background is enterprise technology, so I come from that space and work with types of companies like that. LinkedIn has always been the best-performing channel among the options out there. So about seven or eight years ago, we decided to just focus on LinkedIn. So we’ve been a LinkedIn ads-focused agency for a while now, and back in the day, people were like, “Do people use LinkedIn? Do they use it that much?” And nowadays, the platform’s grown so much, and people are used to using it, so it’s widely known. Everyone uses LinkedIn, especially the professional community, and especially in the tech world.

[00:02:53] Anthony Blatner: So LinkedIn’s grown a lot as a platform, and we’ve been just focused on it for a number of years now. We’ve managed like over a hundred million in ad spend, so we’ve done pretty much anything and everything on the ads platform. And then, yeah, as part of the program, I was one of 10 people who had actually been certified by LinkedIn for LinkedIn advertising.

[00:03:10] Anthony Blatner: It was a great certification program that they have. And then, for the LinkedIn Learning course, I went to the LinkedIn Learning production studio to film and create the course on LinkedIn ads tips and tricks. So if you’re on LinkedIn Learning, you can go find that course there.

[00:03:26] Anthony Blatner: And then, yeah, after spending all day on the computer and online, I like to get out and go for a run after work. And have been a runner here for the last few years. And I’ve just kind of gotten into, you know, once you start running, then you see how far you can run, and then you start to do 5Ks and maybe a half-marathon, and then all the way up to the marathon distance.

[00:03:48] Anthony Blatner: So I’ve been doing a lot of running on the side too.

[00:03:50] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, sure. That’s how all of us runners do it. We just always naturally progress all the way up, you know. So I’m going to start out. There are things you’ve learned working with company after company after company after company that you would recommend we all have our ducks in a row before we jump into campaigns.

[00:04:09] Steve MacDonald: Right. You know, and like what kind of performance can we get, and how much is it going to cost? And like, there are foundational things we need to get in order to create success, right, and to ensure success later on. What are some of those foundational things that you’ve found?

[00:04:25] Anthony Blatner: Yeah, so there are a few different ones. I’d say, like, as you approach LinkedIn, a few of the most important things you want to have in place are knowing who your target audience is and having a very clear definition of that. LinkedIn is still a good testing ground if you want to test anything.

[00:04:44] Anthony Blatner: But, you know, especially in advertising, the more you test in ads, you have to pay for those tests. So the more you have nailed down ahead of time, the more money you’re going to save. So, still definitely a good testing ground, but you want to have the main pieces in place before you start your LinkedIn marketing.

[00:04:59] Anthony Blatner: So knowing who your target audience is is the number one thing going into it. Who do we want to be reaching? What are we offering them? And then what’s the sales process our prospects will go through? The more you have that nailed down and ironed out, the better your results will be across the board.

[00:05:14] Anthony Blatner: And if we want to start with targeting, a few different things that go into that are what are the types of companies we want to be reaching are, and then who are those people at those companies that we want to reach? So I’m sure we’re going to get more, a lot more into ABM here today, but targeting, what you’re offering, and then what your sales process is going to be are the most important items.

[00:05:36] Steve MacDonald: So I just want to say something upfront because those sound like very basic things that, like, okay, any marketing intern would be like, let’s pull that together, right? Lying around the office, we’ve got a definition of our ICP, we’ve got our targeted lists, and we know what our targeted accounts are.

[00:05:49] Steve MacDonald: But I’ve interviewed almost 300 B2B C-suite executives on this podcast, and I ask them what are your two greatest challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth. Number one challenge, 72 percent of C-suite executives said a lack of internal alignment around things like the definition of our ICP, that targeted list in ABM, is like these are the companies we want to get into.

[00:06:09] Steve MacDonald: We want to do business with, we want to create a relationship with, right? Like that list, if you ask that list of sales versus marketing customer success, right? So this alignment that you’re talking about and getting the ducks in the row here, I just want to say that’s not an easy thing to do.

[00:06:34] Steve MacDonald: It sounds like an easy thing to do, but really good to have that nailed down before you start this kind of process. So I just want to do a bit of underpinning on that.

[00:06:45] Anthony Blatner: Definitely important to have everyone on the same page, or else the results you get in the end might not be what one of those teams is looking for. So, definitely very important to have alignment ahead of time, that’s going to save you a lot of headaches later on.

[00:06:52] Anthony Blatner: We like to have that list, that ABM list kind of shared across all those teams. Make sure everyone’s looking at the same list. You know, this list probably lives in your CRM system somewhere, whether it’s HubSpot or Salesforce or a different platform, but have that list live somewhere that’s shared and accessible to everybody so that you’re all looking at the same list and making sure that you’re coming at that list from different sides.

[00:07:17] Steve MacDonald: Now, there’s the list we want to bring to the table, but you also have recommendations on creating targeting systems, right, and using intense signals and things like that to create active lists, like within our list. What are our greatest opportunities? Tell us a little bit about that and what’s unique about LinkedIn in order to get those kinds of targeting signals.

[00:07:41] Anthony Blatner: Yeah, so this would be very company-dependent. Some companies, you know, have their set target account list, and that doesn’t change very often. They update it once a year, or even less often. So very company-dependent. But if you’re a tech company, your list is probably a bit more dynamic, and that’s when you want to build a targeting system that works for you.

[00:08:01] Anthony Blatner: So these days, if your buyer, if they’re making purchasing decisions a few times a year, and if people are continuously going in and out of the market, that’s when these systems are the most effective. And we find that for tech companies, but lots of different industries have this happen too.

[00:08:17] Anthony Blatner: So what we think about building is that ABM list, that target account list, to have that be a dynamic list that can be updated throughout time by these different systems out there. So these days, there are lots of third-party systems that are good at generating or capturing intense signals that a company may be showing.

[00:08:36] Anthony Blatner: Is the company growing? Are they hiring for a specific role or department? Are they adopting a specific technology? Are they making searches for certain types of technology, indicating that they’re in the market, they’re looking to purchase those things? So there are lots of different systems out there where you can generate these signals from.

[00:08:54] Anthony Blatner: And depending on who your audience is, you might go find different data providers that will be providing those signals. And then you want to be pushing those signals into your system. So there are two different ways, you know, a couple of different ways you can build these systems, but sometimes you’re going to have that master list live in your CRM system, and then those signals will come in.

[00:09:16] Anthony Blatner: Most common, it’s either going to be in your CRM, or these days, a lot of people are using Clay to manage this. Using Clay is another good tool because you can have different signals pushing in there, and you can also include steps in your workflow to verify that this company or this signal meets your ICP criteria.

[00:09:34] Anthony Blatner: And then you can use Clay to do some additional things in there. So check for ICP, and then maybe in Clay, you’re going to have it go find relevant contacts at those companies so that you’re building and maintaining your list. This might all happen in your CRM system, which can work.

[00:09:50] Anthony Blatner: But then also if you need some more advanced functionality, maybe you’re going to use Clay there in the middle and then sync that to your CRM system. So at the end of the day, you want to push that list to LinkedIn, and that’s where LinkedIn is very powerful: you can do it dynamically so it’s always updated.

[00:10:21] Anthony Blatner: And then you’re going to be running your campaigns on LinkedIn and then using these dynamic lists, which are updating, and then your targeting is naturally evolving over time. So very effective. And there are different companies entering and exiting the market at any given time.

[00:10:21] Anthony Blatner: So the more that your advertising can reach those right companies, the better results you’re going to get at the end of the day.

[00:10:28] Steve MacDonald: So you said something pretty key there, like coming in and out of market. These companies, so there have been a number of different studies, but there was one by SixSense that said that when a B2B company goes into a buying motion day one, they will put four out of five vendors they are going to evaluate on that list day one.

[00:10:47] Steve MacDonald: And then 95 percent of the time, they are going to buy from one of those lists. So, the key is getting out and getting in front of the decision, right, so that you are known and trusted, and you can be on that list. So in the world of intent signals and what you can do with technologies like Clay and everything, the intent signals are.

[00:11:09] Steve MacDonald: Can we decipher signals that we would classify as pre-buying signals versus post? Can we get that sophisticated in how we are looking at this?

[00:11:19] Anthony Blatner: Yeah, it is going to depend on every industry and every audience as far as where you are going to get those signals from. Like, if you are in real estate tech, you are probably going to get it from the MLS platform or from other things those companies are doing.

[00:11:31] Anthony Blatner: But there are lots of signals on LinkedIn that you can use. There are lots of signals from similar platforms. As you mentioned, SixSense is demand-based. There are lots of those platforms that each generate their own set of signals. So, go evaluate the different platforms and see which ones have the best signals for what you are looking to do.

[00:11:48] Anthony Blatner: But otherwise, yes, there are lots of signals on LinkedIn in terms of who is engaging with this company or this person. And then you can use those signals to identify, hey, if they are already engaging with these different topics or with these companies or people, that is a very early sign of interest.

[00:12:04] Steve MacDonald: Thank you for eloquently restating my question there because it is, on LinkedIn itself, you just answered the question. There are very important intent signals. One of the main reasons we want to be on LinkedIn is to understand those signals, which are among the biggest ways we push out and promote content. Thank you for restating that in a way that makes more sense. You talk about reaching not only the organization but also the people within it. So the buying group, right. So the buying group is the hidden buyer, but various studies have shown that they exert about half the influence on the purchase decision.

[00:12:46] Steve MacDonald: And typically, how you reach them is through your thought leadership. So, how effective is LinkedIn if we are trying to reach the buying group, not just the champion we have meetings with?

[00:13:03] Anthony Blatner: Yeah, so LinkedIn can do this very well in that you can break down your campaigns and have different campaigns that are running.

[00:13:09] Anthony Blatner: One campaign might be going after, so if we say maybe the different personas you might want to be reaching, it depends on the company, but say you are looking to reach a marketing persona. As that deal moves along, you want to reach out to a finance person because they will need to approve it.

[00:13:24] Anthony Blatner: Maybe you want to reach an IT persona because they need to make sure the software is going to integrate into their systems. So you can segment your campaigns and have the same list. But then, in one campaign, you are overlaying the marketing job titles, versus the other campaign, you are overlaying the finance job titles, versus another campaign.

[00:13:43] Anthony Blatner: You are overlaying the IT job titles. Then inside of each of those campaigns, the relevant content and posts, and ads are going to go so that you are delivering the right message, a tailored message to each of those personas.

[00:13:54] Steve MacDonald: So what you are really talking about is it is one overarching campaign, but it is like a bunch of mini campaigns, right?

[00:14:01] Steve MacDonald: We like to think of things as very simple to execute. This is not a simple strategy. That is an entire persona-based messaging strategy for each element of the buying group, which is just growing and growing and growing. But the good news is we can actually target that way. So you can literally go to a specific company, department, or role and target campaigns that way.

[00:14:25] Steve MacDonald: And so here is an interesting question. I know there is not one necessarily answer to this, but LinkedIn has a reputation of being, versus like Facebook or something in the B2B world, like a more expensive ad platform, right? But when you talk about the lifetime value of what you are going to get out of it, and the individual campaigns that go to the buying group here, how would you help us couch this as this is actually a pretty efficient way to go to market?

[00:14:56] Anthony Blatner: So when you compare the targeting options, a lot of platforms just do not have the professional targeting options that many companies want to be using.

[00:15:03] Anthony Blatner: LinkedIn is going to be the best fit for the companies that need and want to reach a very specific target persona at a very specific type of company. So if you are looking to sell to all business owners out there, maybe you are selling credit card solutions to all business owners, then maybe you do use Facebook because you do not need those options that LinkedIn has.

[00:15:22] Anthony Blatner: And if you compare them side by side, yeah, LinkedIn usually is a more expensive platform, but it has these targeting options that you just cannot find anywhere else. So if you are looking to target a very niche professional at a very specific type of company, that is where LinkedIn is really going to be a good bet.

[00:15:37] Anthony Blatner: The things that you can look at, if you are comparing stats, are your cost per qualified lead that you are going to get on each channel. So, usually at the end of the day, when you are doing that math, that is when LinkedIn is going to be competitive because you might be getting leads from Google or Meta, but they might not be the right kind of people.

[00:15:55] Anthony Blatner: Lots of times when I have compared different campaigns here, your leads from Google might be people just looking for research or stuff like that. Leads from Facebook can be all over the place. People did not really know what they were clicking on or signing up for.

[00:16:10] Anthony Blatner: So when you compare cost per qualified lead in the end, LinkedIn is often going to be competitive. Then, when you compare the quality of the traffic versus that of the other platforms.

[00:16:20] Steve MacDonald: Makes perfect sense. Can you give us an example? Do not name any names, right, but where you have been able to deliver a campaign where, say, the CMO or Director of Marketing or whoever you are dealing with is like, wow, I did not realize we could do that.

[00:16:35] Steve MacDonald: We remember things 22 times better when it is told to us in the form of a story. Give us a story of how targeting the buying group or getting the return on investment at various stages in the ABM process, whatever you think is best, but give us a story we can dig our teeth into.

[00:16:55] Anthony Blatner: Sure. In the financial world, there are various certifications people can earn. There is a piece of financial software we are promoting on LinkedIn, designed primarily for this type of financial advisor with a specific certification.

[00:17:10] Anthony Blatner: So it is very niche, and if you target Facebook, there are just no options out there for people who have that specific certification. But on LinkedIn, people often add that skill to their profile. So it makes for a very nice way to target people who have this skill, which indicates they have the certification that we are looking for, that we sell this piece of software to.

[00:17:31] Anthony Blatner: So that is a very clear one. When people list that skill in their profile, great, that is a great option that we can use for targeting. Then, if you are asking about the funnel, it’s very common; the different stages of the funnel you are going to build are the top, middle, and bottom.

[00:17:44] Anthony Blatner: Depending on the audience and the offer, I always say do not make the funnel longer than it needs to be. If you are promoting something people actively want or need, just go right to requesting a demo. But for a lot of enterprise technology, it is a lot more work to get somebody to know who you are, to get them interested, and get them ready and wanting a demo.

[00:17:59] Anthony Blatner: That is when you start to need to introduce the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. For this piece of financial technology, we can go directly to the demo, since they know they need it. There aren’t many great solutions out there, and the one we are promoting is more modern, friendlier, easier to use, and has a good reputation in the market.

[00:18:18] Anthony Blatner: So people are already interested because they know they are using old technology that they hate using, but they can jump to this new platform and have a much better experience. So, for them, we go pretty direct to demo, but we do like to run both brand awareness and demo campaigns at the same time.

[00:18:34] Anthony Blatner: You will get a little bit of lift when you are doing some brand awareness. These days on LinkedIn, the most effective brand awareness campaigns you can run are what we call thought leader ads, or what LinkedIn calls thought leader ads. They sound very fancy, but it is just boosting posts from people.

[00:18:53] Anthony Blatner: Back in the day, you could only run company page ads on LinkedIn, but nowadays you can boost posts from people, and that is what those thought leader ads are. They perform much better because people will always engage with people more than they will companies. It helps people get to know your people at your company and create those relationships.

[00:19:09] Anthony Blatner: Thought leader ads are a great tactic to be using. If you have people in your company who are posting, or if your founders, owners, or executives can post, that is great content to boost. That is really great for brand awareness. It can also work for bottom-of-funnel types of posts, where you might have your post that directs people to the website to go learn more or request a demo.

[00:19:23] Anthony Blatner: For this specific piece of financial technology, we are doing a lot of thought leader ads to get people in the industry to see examples and demos of how other people are using this. Then we send them to the demo page so they can request a demo and see it for themselves.

[00:19:55] Steve MacDonald: So I want to make a comment about, as you said, one of the most important, like, you know, ad campaigns now are these boosted posts, right, from individuals, the brand awareness. So, in a lot of B2B companies, brand awareness is something you almost never talk about at the board level, right? Like, you never go into a board meeting, and no board member is going to look at you and go, “Hey, how is that brand awareness campaign going?”

[00:20:17] Steve MacDonald: Right? They are like, “Hey, what is happening with this quarter’s quota? What does it look like for next quarter?” Here is where it becomes extremely relevant and why what you just talked about there is so important, is that, you know, when I asked these a hundred plus B2B, C-suite executives, what are their top challenges, total challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth?

[00:20:39] Steve MacDonald: Number three on the list was trust. And to go back to that comment we talked about earlier, like that sixth sense, you know, stat, day one, you put four out of the five vendors on average, you are going to look at that list. It is because they are known and they are trusted. If you are not known and trusted in the B2B world, you are not on the day-one list.

[00:20:59] Steve MacDonald: You are not in the pipeline with that opportunity. So this is not like, “Oh, the CMO wants to do a big brand awareness study because, over time, this is going to help us.” Absolutely, it is. This has a direct, short-term impact on a B2B ABM motion. And so I just wanted to, like, accentuate that. And you can be so targeted because you know your ABM target accounts and the people inside them who are the traditional buying group.

[00:21:31] Steve MacDonald: So it is not like you are trying to run a campaign, a big brand campaign to everybody. You are going to run Super Bowl ads. I mean, you are just talking about what you are saying, and tell me if I am not taking what you are saying here and re-articulating it properly. You could be extremely efficient and targeted at a brand campaign, a thought leadership campaign that earns you trust to get on the vendor list day one.

[00:21:53] Anthony Blatner: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And you are going to build trust the fastest when you are going person-to-person, and it is just inherent that you are going to trust a person you are seeing talking about something on LinkedIn versus a brand you are not familiar with. You can go look at that person’s profile and get to know them. Where have they worked? What do they do? Where are they from? Versus a company, you are not going to build that trust as fast. You definitely can, but just not as fast as, like, the thought leader ads will. This is also a place where B2B influencer marketing can become effective.

[00:22:24] Anthony Blatner: So not just your people, but other people who are talking about you can be great to boost. Sometimes this can be, like, customer testimonials. If customers are already posting good things about you, like good experiences on LinkedIn, that is amazing content to boost. And then the whole influencer marketing strategy can start working in B2B.

[00:22:43] Anthony Blatner: A good recent example, I think Clay did a really good job of this when they were kind of launching and scaling. So I mentioned Clay earlier for the capabilities of what that platform can do, but then also, maybe, I do not know, maybe six months, a year ago, they did a big effort where a lot of people were just naturally posting these different workflows they were building with Clay, and like, oh, cool, look what I built.

[00:23:01] Anthony Blatner: And then they started to boost all these different posts from all these different people. And then, suddenly, if you are on LinkedIn, you start to see posts from all these people about this tool they are using. And you are like, all right, I have got to go check this out because everyone is talking about it.

[00:23:13] Anthony Blatner: And that is, like, starting to leverage the power of social and LinkedIn and all that, where, hey, if everyone is talking about something, then I need to go check it out. And this is, like, something you can start building and doing with your marketing by boosting posts from multiple voices. And then you do not need to target everybody, but you can be very specific in your targeting. So you are focusing all these voices on the exact target market you want to reach. That allows you to be efficient with your ad spend because advertising is just a function of, you know, how targeted you can be versus how much wasted ad spend might occur.

[00:23:46] Steve MacDonald: I was having a conversation the other day with, I think, a general who was a three-time B2B CRO, and he said, the influencer in B2B is our own customers. If we are not using our customers’ voices in our pipeline, they are the peer community we are selling to. They are the ones that the buyer wants to listen to, not us.

[00:24:06] Steve MacDonald: So your strategy, what you just talked about, is turning the voice of your own customers into one of your biggest selling megaphones for you, and doing it efficiently and very targeted on LinkedIn. Huge opportunity. I hope that people are taking away a whole new kind of, you know, idea of multiple levels of strategy that you can go into from the intent signals that we talked about early to the very targeted strategic influencer kind of campaigns.

[00:24:34] Steve MacDonald: They are going to get you into the pipeline because at the end of the day, it is all about pipeline. I know at the end of the day when you are going back through campaigns, your clients are looking at it, going, like, how did this get more into our pipeline? Right? So overall, not any particular campaign or client or anything, but in general, when you know your new business prospects, the current customers you have, they want pipeline, right? Bottom line. That is the number one KPI. What do you say to the audience here about just, it seems we have had a lot of conversation, obviously impacts the pipeline, but if that is the number one KPI, what do you promise? Like what do you, or what do you say, this is what we can do when you are in a new business conversation saying, yeah, absolutely we can impact the pipeline?

[00:25:20] Anthony Blatner: So, you know, a lot of it is going to start with, like, what are the leads that you are generating? So let me break it down a few different categories. And first of all, it’s just: who are the people we are going to be reaching and influencing? You know, a lot of this depends on the company’s sales cycle.

[00:25:35] Anthony Blatner: Yes, we want to be driving pipeline and then, of course, people are just going to be looking at, are those opportunities closing into sales? For many B2B companies, sales cycles are very long, so it can take six months, a year, or longer to really see those results shake out. So in the very early days, we want to make sure we are reaching the right people.

[00:25:53] Anthony Blatner: For a lot of these companies, they are like, “Hey, we want to reach the VP and C-suite at this type of company.” And they know it is kind of hard to reach these people in general, but if we can put those exact targeting options into LinkedIn and reach them, that is number one. That is a win there. We are reaching the right people who are otherwise hard to reach.

[00:26:07] Anthony Blatner: Number two is then, yes, are we able to generate some sort of interest or lead from them? Are we getting them to sign up for webinars and attend webinars? Are they downloading pieces of content? What early steps can show they are starting to raise their hands, say they are interested, or ask for more information?

[00:26:24] Anthony Blatner: In those early days, it can also be good to see if they are following your company page? Are they following your people? So these are just some early signals: if it is hard or takes a long time to generate a lead or a sales opportunity, or to close a deal, these are early signals you want to look for.

[00:26:48] Anthony Blatner: But then, yeah, towards later on in the funnel, here it is. Yes, are we generating leads? Are we starting sales conversations? And then are those sales conversations turning into pipeline and then turning into closed-won deals? So it is the whole system there we’re talking about. Some companies have a very short funnel, and that moves very fast. Other companies have a very long sales funnel, a much longer process where you look at different touchpoints along the way.

[00:27:05] Anthony Blatner: I will also say these days there is better tracking and tooling around this. Back in the day, it used to be, like, look in your CRM and see where the sources are from these different contacts and leads. But that would always skew very heavily to search because while you could be doing tons of marketing out there, you could be having billboards, stuff like that, at the end of the day, people are probably going to go search and look up your company.

[00:27:24] Anthony Blatner: It is always going to look like they are coming from search, even though really they saw you in other places and then decided to finally search for you. So just looking at your CRM sources is not sufficient. It is going to give you skewed data, so there is a lot better tooling these days that helps show you the customer journey and all the touchpoints along the way.

[00:27:58] Anthony Blatner: You can start to plug in the different channels you are using, whether it is LinkedIn or Google or Meta or email and your website and stuff, and it puts it all into, like, a journey map for you so you can see all the touchpoints somebody goes through in the path of becoming an opportunity and then in the path of closing. So there is some really insightful data there.

[00:28:16] Anthony Blatner: And what a lot of companies are finding is it is not just search as they thought by looking at their CRM data. It is more of, you know, people are finding out about us in different places and then searching for us. And in B2B, it can be a lot of, like, “oh, they heard about us at this conference or on this podcast or someplace on LinkedIn.” You know, they heard us on LinkedIn, and then they decided to go search for us.

[00:28:32] Anthony Blatner: So these other platforms are giving us the visibility we need to see where those original sources are, not just what was the last touch in the CRM.

[00:28:40] Steve MacDonald: I know this conversation could go on another couple hours, but I have one last question, and it is to the point where, you know, we have covered so much territory here that if there was one thing that you wanted B2B, C-suite executives that are going to be tuning into this conversation to take away as one main thing, what would that be?

[00:29:02] Anthony Blatner: I think it is pretty simple, just get started with LinkedIn. A lot of people are hesitant to even get their posting started because they are like, “What do I talk about?” You need to get started by creating content, posting it on LinkedIn, and finding your voice. The more comfortable you get with just posting on LinkedIn, the more you can start building marketing campaigns using the ad platforms.

[00:29:25] Anthony Blatner: But number one is to leverage the free parts of LinkedIn. Just get started posting there, and then you can move into advertising and other facets.

[00:29:33] Steve MacDonald: Thank you, Anthony, so much. You shed such a spotlight on the opportunities on LinkedIn today, and I just wanted to say thank you for coming on the podcast and being part of the conversation.

[00:29:44] Anthony Blatner: Thanks for having me. That was a great discussion.